The King’s New Clothes. Stanislaw August and his Garderobe
The aim of my project is to understand and describe the functioning of the Garderobe of last king of Poland, Stanisław August (1732-1798). I am interested in both the wardrobe, i.e. the set of outfits owned by the king, and the Garderobe understood as the set of court employees involved in the daily care of the royal body. However, I place particular emphasis on a somewhat broader issue: the king’s strategy for buying items, the scale of his expenditure on clothing, and the surrounding microcosm of mediators, middlemen, traders, tailors and jewellers, many of whom come from German-speaking areas, France or the Ottoman Empire, attempting through this to construct a narrative on male consumerism in 18th century Central Europe and it’s social background. Another aim of the project is to identify the role that acquisitions played in the king’s daily life and to identify possible singularities and anomalies. Stanisław August kept the accounts of the Garderobe by himself and wrote them with his own hands. He booked into it not only purchases of clothes but also objects intended for diplomatic gifts and orders distributed as part of party-building. Hence, one of the questions that the project attempts to answer concerns the issue of the incursion of public and political affairs into a field that should theoretically be very private, or even intimate.
